Michiko’s House

MEIRA CHAND

“Honey,” Jack sighed as Michiko threw a towel from his morning shower over the rail of the balcony. “Of course, I leave it to you, laundry is not my department, but back home we don’t do it like this. Not nowadays anyway.”

Michiko shrugged. Jack turned, stepping from the narrow balcony into the room. He might say he left it to her but his tone was contentious. She had explained many times to him the difference between the hot air of the clothes dryer and the freshness given their towels by the sweet clear rays of the sun.

“Bullshit,” he always answered.

She no longer offered an explanation but just got on with the job of airing the quilts, which she did twice a week, and pegging out the damp towels. In compromise she had moved the general clothes line from the balcony to a narrow space behind the house. Only on rainy days would she consider using the large American clothes dryer in the basement of the house. Michiko took up the bamboo beater and brought it down hard upon the eiderdowns hanging over the rail in the morning sun. Vlump. Vlump. Then she followed Jack into the bedroom where he sat on a chair pulling on his socks. As she entered the room he gave her a look that belied the soft curl of his words.

“I’m sure you know best, Honey. It’s just that I feel there’s no need to deck the house in bunting. It’s not the kind of thing you see much in a neighborhood like ours. More foreigners in this area, I suppose.” Jack stood up and looked into the mirror, giving his tie a last tug. “Well, I’m off to work now.”

Michiko followed him down the stairs and presented him at the door with freshly polished shoes. Picking up the remote control for the garage she pressed it, listening to the creak of metal as the shutter wound up. She waited until Jack drove away from the house, then pressed the remote control once more. With a tortuous creak the shutter rolled down of its own volition. It stopped with the usual small, tinny thump. Michiko closed the front door and went back upstairs. In the children’s room she collected the quilts off their beds and further damp towels flung down on the floor of their shower. Pushing open the large sliding windows of the room she struggled out onto the balcony with her bulky armful. The sun shone hotly onto the rail as she draped the quilts upon it. Since they all slept on beds and not Japanese style on the floor, there were no sleeping pallets to air, only the light fluffy eiderdowns.

There was no satisfaction like thumping the bedding, thwacking it hard with the beater. The dust flew up in a cloud. By afternoon the towels had dried hard and the quilts were filled by the sun. The maid who came each day could have done the job, but Michiko would not consider it. The ritual belonged to her. She stood back in satisfaction, hands on hips. Now the quilts were out airing her day could begin.

As a child she had helped her mother hang out the family’s bedding. She had hated the chore, she remembered. Then, from that long ago balcony of her old home, she had looked out over rice fields, flooded and glassy in early summer, reflecting the movement of the sky. The view was velvet green through the hot months of high summer, alive with the croak of frogs and the sawing of cicadas. In autumn the brown of the cut rice stubble was caught by flaming globes of persimmon, hanging on bare trees. Snow blanketed everything in winter, deadening sound and filling the old house with an unearthly white light. In good weather the neighboring houses in the village were festooned through the day like her own, by a plethora of quilts.

Vlump. Vlump. Michiko’s arm as it swung the bamboo beater had the muscle of a professional. Now, from her balcony she looked down on the city of Kobe. Michiko’s house was built on a hill. It looked over the town to the port with its cranes and the smoking chimneys of a steel works. Beyond this jumble was the sea, unconcerned and vacant. Ships drifted slowly by. She was far from the rice fields of memory here.

Some distance away to the right she could make out the cobalt blue roof-tiles of Yoshiko Grant’s house, and beyond it the gables of Emiko Wallace’s home. To the left was the apartment block in which lived Megumi Smith and Tami Cooper. Its thrusting walls and gleaming windows almost hid the dilapidated residence of Fumiko Hall. It was an area of Kobe where many foreigners lived, for the American school was nearby. Michiko’s two children and those of her friends who, like herself, were married to foreigners, all went to the school. Only Fumiko Hall sent her children to a Japanese school.

Michiko and her friends had been affronted by Fumiko’s decision. She made it appear there was a choice in the matter. Their children were foreigners, like their fathers. By Japanese law they could no more take the nationality of their mothers than they could alter the structure of their bones. It was known they suffered taunts in Japanese schools because of their difference in an elitist system. And Jack would not hear of it. “They are Americans and have nothing to gain from an alien school system that anyway rejects them.” The American school radiated a protective aura, sealed off in its own tiny world, unattached to the body of Japan. Michiko and her friends proudly observed their children as they merged with this elusive entity, absorbing its codes and ways of thought so different from their own. It did not seem fair of Fumiko to thrust such hardship upon her children, forcing them to identify with a culture that denied them. Why must she always try to be different? Neither Michiko or her friends saw much of Fumiko. She was a snob, they decided.

Vlump. Vlump. The quilts swelled beneath the beater. Each morning, surveying the town spreading away below her, Michiko was reminded that none of her friends had a home equal to hers. None had the money nor the prospect of permanence in Japan. Jack had his own company importing surgical instruments, and was doing well. He had been many years in Japan. Michiko had met him while she was working in a textile firm that had also then employed Jack. Against her parents’ wishes Michiko had left the village and gone to live with a brother in Osaka. She soon found a job filling in documents, one of many girls in a large office. Jack, arriving as crew on a ship from America, had liked the look of Japan and stayed on. They never spoke much about those early years. Jack had done well for himself and nothing else mattered. He had made a life for himself in Japan.

Tami, Yoshiko, Emiko, and Megumi were all married to men who worked for multinational companies and could be transferred at any time. Only Fumiko Hall was different. She and her husband, Robert, were both enduring tenure at Kobe University. Michiko brought the beater down hard on the quilts. She did not know why she felt angry whenever she thought of Fumiko Hall. Although she did not like the woman, she was always curious to know more about her. Just the sight of Fumiko’s old wooden house, its roof heavily tiled in an old fashioned way, and with white paper shoji at the windows, irritated her. The guttering needed re-doing. Plaster-work peeled badly. The eaves sagged dangerously at one corner. Only the garden was immaculate, with clipped trees and several old stone lanterns. It seemed the Halls liked their lanterns. Recently, Michiko had observed an open truck arrive with a new acquisition. A small crane on the truck had lowered the heavy stone sections over the hedge into the Halls’ garden. Michiko knew a good thing when she saw it. She had bought a brand new lantern of molded concrete, one of carved stone seemed an unnecessary expense; the effect was the same and that was what mattered. Lanterns like those the Halls collected did not come cheaply. Where would academics get such money? Michiko had told Tami about the lantern. But Tami already knew. She walked her dog in the grounds of a nearby shrine where Fumiko Hall also walked her dog.

“They get them off demolition sites, before the bulldozers scoop them up. The workmen are glad to be rid of them for free. Fumiko only had to arrange the price of a truck. She told me herself,” Tami announced. A wave of relief filled Michiko, and she began to laugh with Tami. How absurd to admit to such a practice, instead of pretending to have spent much money.

Michiko gave the quilts a last whack and then left them to the sun. She had agreed to meet Tami, Emiko, Yoshiko, and Megumi at the club for lunch. At least once a week they met there for a meal or a drink in the bar after shopping, or in summer to sit by the pool. She dressed carefully in a smart new suit. There was a meeting of a group of ikebana enthusiasts at the club today. The dining room would be filled with them lunching before their meeting.

When at last Michiko reached her destination it was difficult to find a place to park for the crush of cars. Tall trees and the scent of seclusion engulfed her as she drove slowly up the drive. There was something secret about this enclave, cut off from the bustling world of Japan, catering only to the foreign community. On the street outside people passed but could not enter, unable to warrant distinction. Michiko never arrived at the club without a flutter of nerves, and a need to re-check her appearance before facing the scrutiny of the place.

They were waiting for her in the dining room. Emiko had phoned in advance for a table. As expected the room was crowded, mostly with foreign women. The only Japanese faces to be seen were a scattering of wives like herself, or the bartenders, waiters, and office staff. Michiko, Emiko, Tami, Megumi, and Yoshiko always went to the club together. They laughed a lot and ate a lot and enjoyed themselves immensely. Only once or twice had Michiko ventured there alone. Then, suddenly, the place had seemed daunting. Nobody stopped to speak to her other than in passing. She had left quickly, glad to regain the bustling street with its familiar knowledge and perceptions. With Jack beside her at the club everything seemed different. They were always part of a group and if nobody addressed her directly it did not seem to matter. There was so much laughter and conversation to which, even if she did not always follow, she could nod agreement. Yet, in whatever circumstances, once outside the gates of the place she was filled by relief. It was as if she were at last allowed to dismount an uncomfortable animal.

On the way to the dining room she passed the notice board and stopped short before it in surprise. It bore a large picture of Fumiko Hall. She was to lecture the following month at the club to the American Chamber of Commerce, on the novels of Junichiro Tanizaki. Michiko could not describe the emotion seeping slowly through her. Why should Fumiko Hall be invited into the club in so elite a manner? Who could be interested in Tanizaki? Michiko had never read his books. Fumiko was not a member of the club and appeared singularly without ambition to penetrate the place. Once, when Tami had invited her to join them at lunch, she had replied, “Oh, I can’t stand that place.” They did not invite her again.

“They cannot afford the membership, that’s all,” Yoshiko decided, trying to plumb the mystery of Fumiko’s aversion. “Don’t forget, they are just teachers. Robert doesn’t earn the same kind of money as our husbands. I feel sorry for Fumiko, don’t you?” But somehow, once this explanation was before them, it was difficult to feel anything but pleased.

Michiko entered the crowded dining room. Several women waved from afar, or stopped her as she passed to offer her a word. At last she reached her friends and sat down gratefully amongst them. Even as they ordered from the menu the talk was all of Fumiko Hall and the forthcoming lecture.

“Did you know,” said Tami suddenly, “that their house belongs to them; they own it. I’d always thought they rented it. Fumiko told me they have to get the roof redone and it is going to cost them plenty. They must be sitting on a gold mine. That house is almost on the main road and the plot is twice the size of yours.” Tami looked at Michiko. “The house is apparently in Fumiko’s name and inherited from her father. Did you know he was that famous writer who committed suicide with a mistress several years ago?”

Everyone looked at each other. No one knew quite what to say.

Michiko’s first thought was, why should Fumiko Hall own a house at all, and one showered from Heaven so easily upon her? It had taken years before Michiko and Jack had been able to buy a plot and build a house of their own. Land prices were prohibitive, few people could afford their own home. Even now there remained a large mortgage.

There had been, Michiko remembered, a great argument between herself and Jack about the kind of house they should build. The whole thing could have been achieved at a fraction of the eventual cost had she agreed to a Japanese-style construction of thin plaster walls about a wooden frame and roof-tiles that blew off in typhoons. But the house of Michiko’s dreams had been in ferro-concrete. Even as a child the heavy municipal buildings in the village, the town hall, the banks, the health care center, had seemed to her, passing them on her way to and from school, to represent superiority. In those buildings she was confronted by bureaucrats endowed with their fistful of power. There, the silent queues of village people, women in homely white aprons, old people bent from planting rice, rough farmers with weather-beaten faces, were diminished of any stature. Those buildings ended with the main street. Then again there was the jigsaw of rice fields and radish patches. Old farmhouses came into view with heavy roofs and wooden shutters and logs stacked up for heating the bath under the shelter of eaves; the houses of farmers, like her own family. The abrupt transition of that village road had even then impressed itself upon her as the difference between power and poverty. She had always vowed to leave the village.

“Did you know, Fumiko is making a name for herself as a journalist? My maid saw her on the television in some political program,” Emiko informed them after they had ordered their food.

Michiko thought of the old lanterns in Fumiko’s garden and the dilapidated house, still rooted in the past, that always reminded her of her own village. Suddenly, she wanted to hear no more about the woman. Anyone but Fumiko, owning so much land, would have pulled down the old house, borrowed money from the bank, and built an apartment block. Everyone was doing just that. Who wanted an old wooden house?

Yoshiko, Megumi, Tami, and Emiko had all been envious of Michiko’s house when it was built, but in a nice way, with many ohs and ahs at the pink fitted carpet, the glossy furniture, and the modern chandeliers. The house imposed on the curve of a hill, roofless as a bunker upon its deep foundations. A concrete fin, extending from either side, elongated the structure upon the tiny square of land. This deception of size had been Michiko’s idea. “Bigger,” she demanded, “I want it to look bigger.”

When the house was finished Jack had insisted on a house-warming party. He had invited all the people in the foreign community whom they knew, and also some they did not. Michiko had hesitated, but Jack had been insistent.

“I want everyone to see the house.” His pride had overwhelmed her.

Jack had also invited some Japanese business associates who had come and gone quickly, ill at ease in the crowd of foreigners who towered above them physically and, not speaking their language, ignored them. The only other Japanese had been wives like Michiko.

Michiko had made sure she personally gave all their guests a tour of the house. If she missed them on arrival she had gone up to them later and said, “Now, shall I show you the house?” Some of them had seemed surprised and been inclined to stay with their drinks. Walking before them she chatted about the fixtures and furniture imported from Italy, the lace curtains flown in from Germany. The guests were full of congratulations. Only once did she see a group of American women standing in a corner with their glasses of wine, looking about in a way she did not like. They talked too fast for Michiko to understand, but their expressions remained with her long after they left. It made her wonder if she had got everything right.

The planning of the interior had been a great anxiety. The more magazines she opened, the more foreign homes she surreptitiously looked about, the more confused she became. The things that Westerners put in their homes were things she did not want. There were so often objects about that were battered and old. Antiques. They all had a craze for antiques. To Michiko’s eye these things littered their homes bizarrely. She had grown up surrounded by dingy, iron-bound chests and rough hand-stenciled fabrics of indigo. Braziers, large and small, of wood and lacquer or porcelain were all they had had to warm themselves by. Yet now, in the homes of foreigners, she saw these things put to ludicrous uses. Potted plants stood in braziers. A weathered wooden door was turned into a table. An abacus became a lamp stand. An obi was slung across a wall. It made her want to laugh. In the village her mother had thrown out all the old chests and replaced them with tallboys of laminated veneer. Instead of chilblains and braziers there were now gas fires. Metal shutters and doors replaced warped, weathered wood. Michiko was in no doubt about how she wanted her house to look; it must be bright and new and shiny.

She wished she had not remembered the housewarming party. The memory never failed to rankle, even though the party had appeared a success. All the women who had greeted her in the dining room had come to that party. She had met them again in other foreign drawing rooms. Although she had never been rude to them, they spoke badly in front of her about Japan. This country, they said in exasperation. Or these people this or that. The words “they” and “we” were always being used, Michiko had noticed. Sometimes, she even found herself sitting between two Westerners who were conversing in this manner, as if she were invisible. Invisible. That was the word, she decided. She only came into focus for them beside Jack. She looked about the dining room at the sharp-featured, ample-hipped, animated women, their eyes trawling the room for grist. Suddenly, she knew why Fumiko Hall must hate this place.

“What’s the matter,” asked Megumi, peering at her in a worried manner.

“Headache,” said Michiko, and she began to eat her meal.

She drove home after lunch without even the motivation to pass a dilatory car. Her thoughts pressed down upon her. The memory of the housewarming party still floated in her mind, like debris stirred up in a murky pond. She squinted at the sky. The sun had already lost its strength. The moment she arrived home she must bring in the quilts. A surge of comfort filled her at the thought of the job ahead. Why she should look forward to a chore she had hated so much as a child was difficult to determine. The car in front stopped at a traffic light and Michiko came to a halt behind it. A crowd of children from the American school ambled across the road. They pushed one another and fell about laughing. One grabbed a schoolbag from a friend and threw it in the air. They began to fight on the crossing. For the first time their unkempt appearance and blatant manners irritated Michiko. Why could they not behave in the orderly way of Japanese children? Yet, who was she to complain? Her own children, Carol and John, affected the same conduct and appearance. Now, as they got older, it was more and more apparent to Michiko that she had produced two foreigners. They seemed to have nothing to do with her. Some molding about the eyes was all she could lay claim to. At first, as they grew, she had looked at them in wonderment, proud of their light hair and insolence, their fluent English and long limbs. But as they reached the edge of their teens a distance had grown, almost imperceptibly, between herself and them. Sometimes she had the feeling when they were with her at the club, or on those occasions she visited their school, that they were embarrassed by her. They giggled, rolling their eyes if she pronounced a word wrongly. Or they corrected her English before their teachers, or the people at the club. They refused to speak to her in Japanese. They chattered in English, and she was forced to follow, stumbling over the difficult grammar, ineffectual with her syntax. When they conversed with Jack the gabble of voices raced ahead of her, until she sat silent on her chair, without any attempt to follow. If she spoke in Japanese, she was answered in English. Her voice faltered before her children’s stern gaze, and the rejection of all she offered. It was as if her own offspring were denied her. Her eyes filled suddenly with tears. She watched the children from the American school reach the further curb and continue on their rowdy way. The traffic began to move again. Michiko drove on.

The tears ran freely now down her cheeks. She almost missed her own road when she came to it and turned sharply, unable to see clearly where she was going. The car mounted the pavement and crashed into a lamppost. Michiko was thrown suddenly forward over the wheel, and then back in the seat again. The shock of it made her gasp, her heart pumped in her throat. Slowly, she realized she was unhurt, and her tears welled up again. Her fingers trembled on the steering wheel, but she backed the car until it sat by the curb. Then she sank her head in her hands.

There was a knocking at the window. Startled, Michiko looked up into the face of Fumiko Hall, who had already pulled open the car door.

“Are you all right? I was walking the dog. I saw it happen.”

“I’m all right. I’m going home now.” Michiko attempted to shut the door while searching for a tissue with which to wipe her eyes.

“You are in no state to drive. Come along, get out. I’ll give you a cup of coffee and then you’ll feel better. See, you’ve stopped outside my house as it is.” Fumiko silently observed Michiko’s distressed and swollen face.

Michiko looked up to see the neat hedge of Fumiko’s house and the top of a large stone lantern. She nodded and allowed Fumiko to help her out of the car. Fumiko opened a rickety door in the roofed wooden gate and Michiko followed her and the dog up a cobbled path. She had never been inside Fumiko’s house before. As well as the lanterns, she could now see the garden held a small tea house on the point of disintegration. Fumiko followed her gaze.

“My father used this house at one time. He enjoyed the tea ceremony. His mistress lived here, and he wrote one of his best books in this place. But, as you can see, it is impossible to maintain it properly. I’m afraid we keep garden tools in the tea house now.”

“What about your mother?” Michiko asked. She removed her shoes and stepped up into the house behind Fumiko. The familiar, dank smell of old homes surrounded her. Michiko took a breath of musty air, and caught a faint odor of drains. Fumiko took her into a tatami room and motioned to a cushion before a low lacquer table. Oranges in a blue ceramic bowl glowed in the room but, in spite of large windows overlooking the garden, the sun did not reach far.

“My mother died when I was small. Although my father remarried, my grandmother brought me up. My father never had time for me,” Fumiko said. Soon she went to make the coffee.

Michiko followed Fumiko’s directions to the bathroom and assessed her face there in the mirror. She dabbed her eyes with a tissue and pressed some powder on her nose, then made her way back down the passage. The house was on one level and she passed several closed sliding doors. Michiko looked about but there was no sign of Fumiko. Quickly, she pulled back a door a few inches and peered into the room behind. A double quilt was laid out on the floor under an indigo coverlet with a bold stenciled design. A brush painting hung upon the wall above an iron-bound chest. A globe of thick rice paper covered a hanging light. This must be Fumiko and Robert’s bedroom Michiko thought, and hastily shut the door.

She sat back before the lacquer table to wait for Fumiko. The matting of the floor was frayed in one place. A fine scroll above a vase of peonies filled an alcove. Books were everywhere. It was nothing like her childhood home and yet, the same presence of dampness and drains assailed, the same dim shuttered atmosphere possessed the place. The patina of age touched everything. The tension eased suddenly in her body. It was a long time since she had been inside an old house. If she shut her eyes and ran her hand over the smooth, cool matting she could imagine herself back in the village, curled up long ago on a cushion, concentrating on her homework. She wished suddenly now she had put a tatami room in her own house and not listened to Jack’s objections. On the one occasion her parents had visited, they had been uncomfortable and not known where to sit.

Her parents had come to see the house not long after Michiko and Jack moved in. It had been difficult to persuade them to leave the village and take first one train and then another. They were not used to journeys. Her mother had packed warm underwear and a large quantity of rice balls, as well as a bottle of home-made plum pickles. All these things and more had been tied up in squares of cloth. They were then retied in a larger square which Michiko’s father hoisted upon his back. In this manner they had arrived at Michiko’s house.

At first they had been afraid to step inside. Her father had lowered the bundle from his back and stood, diminished without it, in his only suit of ill-fitting navy serge, looking about with an open mouth.

“Otosan,” Michiko’s mother had warned, and he shut his mouth obediently.

Before sitting them down Michiko had taken them on a tour of the house. They had walked silently behind her as she chatted, telling them how much had been paid for each item. Now even her mother’s mouth hung slightly open. The old people’s heads constantly revolved, right then left, up then down.

“The ceilings are so high I can hardly see them,” Michiko’s mother whispered. “What do you do with all these rooms? Aren’t you frightened by so much space?”

“Okaasan,” Michiko laughed. “This is the way all foreigners live.”

“Even so,” her mother replied.

She knelt down as she spoke and began to untie her bundle of belongings upon the living room floor. Retrieving a rice ball from a plastic box, she handed it to Michiko’s father.

“If he is hungry there are many things I can give him,” Michiko was unable to hide her disapproval. “Tonight I will cook you Kobe steak.”

Her father sat down cross-legged upon a flowered velvet couch and took a great bite of his rice ball. “Simple village fare is best. Nobody cooks like your mother.”

“We do not need expensive foods,” her mother admonished gently.

“But every day we eat steak and things like that,” Michiko laughed.

“That is why all foreigners are big people,” her father commented. “They eat so much. Cow meat, butter, cheese. It is not for nothing they used to say foreigners stank of butter. Now, even our own people have become so crazy for foreign things they also smell the same.” A morsel of rice dropped onto the velvet. Michiko rushed forward to clear it up.

Her mother now unpacked a kimono from the bundle upon the living room floor. Michiko’s father stood up and began to remove his uncomfortable suit. Michiko hurried them upstairs to the spare bedroom.

“I have never slept on a bed before,” her father announced, stopping in the doorway. “I shall roll off and break my head. I have not come here to die.”

Later, Jack returned home and in order to break the awkwardness of the occasion, had plied her father with whiskey. He did not refuse and drank down glass after glass with gusto. His face became a bright red and his manner increasingly animated. From sitting cross-legged upon the couch, he had sprawled upon the living room floor, his kimono agape. His legs, in thick pale woolen underwear, were unashamedly displayed. In the night he had rolled from his bed with a resounding thump and insisted on returning home the next morning. They had never come again.

“Coffee,” said Fumiko, putting a tray on the table before them.

Michiko drank the hot, bitter liquid gratefully. Before her Fumiko’s face, devoid of make-up, was intelligent and concerned.

“I must get home. Soon the dew will come down and the quilts will absorb the damp,” Michiko announced. She stirred but did not stand up.

“I’m afraid I’m not nearly as house proud as you,” Fumiko sighed. “I always feel guilty when I see you airing the quilts, just like our mothers taught us. An old house like this has so much dirt, I really should do more. I’m afraid I’m very lazy.”

Michiko could not but agree. In a house like this she might be tempted to air the quilts everyday. Obviously, from what she had spied of Fumiko’s sleeping arrangements, she did not even bother to roll up her bedding by day. How much dust a good beating might release from this slovenly house. Michiko tried to feel cross and could not.

There was a noise in the porch as the front door was pulled back and then the sound of children’s voices.

“Makoto. Yumi. We’re in here,” called Fumiko.

A boy and a girl appeared before them and Michiko smiled a greeting. They were both dressed in the dark serge of Japanese school uniform, the girl’s outfit broken by a white-edged sailor collar. They returned her greeting politely. Michiko thought of the scruffy blue jeans her own children insisted on wearing, and the cursory greeting they would have extended to Fumiko as they threw themselves down upon chairs, schoolbags dropped by the door. Once or twice in the past it had been suggested that the children play together, but the occasions had not been a success.

“There are snacks in the kitchen, then get on with your homework. And afterward you’d better pack your bag for that trip to your great-grandmother tomorrow,” Fumiko ordered. She spoke in Japanese.

“Don’t they speak English?” Michiko asked in surprise. It was difficult to believe these children had a foreign father.

“Of course,” Fumiko replied. “Although their reading and writing is terrible. We’ve got to do something about it. I keep telling Robert to speak to them in English, but he rarely does. I suppose it’s all right. They get enough of America one way or another. We go back each summer to Robert’s parents. When they’re older they’ll probably get their higher education there. It would be so easy for them to lose Japan, and I don’t want that to happen. They’ve a few days holiday from tomorrow. My grandmother is really too old to cope, but she insists they come. And they seem not to mind. Of course, she is not far away, only in Ashiya and it is just for a night.”

It had been nearly two years since Michiko’s children had seen their grandparents. She frowned in shock at the length of time, lost without an accounting. In the past Michiko had taken her family each New Year to the village, to participate in the traditional festivities. But Jack’s grumbles got louder with each year. He refused to adapt to the uncongenial conditions of her old home.

“My legs are too long to sit upon the floor,” he glowered.

He raged about the toilet which, like most in the village, was no more than a hole in a tiled floor over an open cesspool. Until his shocked rejection she had thought little about it. Now she felt ashamed. He complained that there was not a chair in the house until one was bought especially for him. The small, rush-matted rooms were always swollen for the New Year’s festivities with returning relatives. Privacy to bathe or shave was unavailable. Everyone walked about in states of drunkenness and undress. Jack complained at the number of people who, by necessity, slept with them in their room, and the unbroken diet of Japanese food. The television was on all day. In the end it was easier to leave him at home.

She had returned then to the village each year with only the children. But they, remembering his grumbles, seemed little happier than their father. They refused to join their cousins and the rest of the village to see the yearly pounding of soft, cooked rice for the making of New Year delicacies.

“Who cares,” complained Carol, returning to the sounds of her Walkman close about her ears.

“We see the same thing each year. It’s boring,” John said. “When can we go home?” They watched cartoons on the television.

Their grandparents viewed them from afar, affection tempered by hesitation over so many unbridgeable things. On both sides the rot of distance set in. Michiko cringed before the glaring eyes of her children and soon left them at home with Jack. For some years she had gone overnight alone to the village on the last day of New Year. And later not at all.

Yumi returned from the kitchen brushing the crumbs of a rice cracker from her mouth. She pushed open the door of her room across the corridor. Michiko was relieved to see a solid bed in Yumi’s room, and an untidy heap of books, puzzles, and tattered dolls. She had expected quilts upon the floor again and immaculate shelves. On one wall were several framed pictures of nursery rhymes. There was one of a girl and a spider. Next to it was an old woman and a shoe house. Another was of a mouse and a clock, and the last of a cow and a moon. They were all pictures of rhymes Jack used to chant to Carol and John when they were small. Michiko had never been able to remember the nonsense words that were without meaning to her. When they were small, before they went to school, the children had spoken to her in Japanese, just like Fumiko’s children. There was no reason Carol and John should not still speak in Japanese, they were as fluent in that language as in English.

Hey diddle diddle,

The cat and the fiddle,

The cow jumped over the moon. . . .

Some words came back to her. Silly words. Why should a cow jump over the moon? Jack had never been able to explain the meanings. Just nonsense, he said, shrugging off her efforts to understand.

Michiko put down her empty coffee cup. The vision of damp quilts welled up again in her mind. “I must go,” she said, and stood up abruptly.

Fumiko nodded and called Yumi to say goodbye. Of Makoto there was no sign. “Eating,” sighed Fumiko. “All he wants to do is eat. It is as if he has hollow limbs. It is the age, I suppose.”

“I know,” Michiko nodded. “John is just the same.”

“Come again whenever you want,” Fumiko invited.

“Maybe I will,” Michiko answered.

She passed under the old shingled roof of the gate, and Fumiko closed the door behind her. At the soft coupling of the lock she turned. An inexplicable feeling of desolation filled her. Above the green of the hedge the top of a lantern protruded. She could just make out the broken guttering under the old tiled roof. Everything else in Fumiko’s world was now hidden from the busy road of speeding cars. The gate held fast on a secret place. It was as if Michiko were shut out forever from something she could not define.

She opened the door of the car. Up the hill she could see her own home, perched like a sentinel above the other houses. The glass and concrete were caught now by the setting sun, and quilts colored each balcony. For a moment she had no desire to return to the immaculate rooms of glossy furniture and the pink fitted carpets. Then again she remembered the dew that would, even now, be descending upon her quilts.

She hurried upstairs as soon as she got in. But, as she feared, the bedding had already absorbed a blanket of dew. Tears of frustration welled up again into her eyes. Now she would feel the dampness upon her all night. After replacing the quilts upon the beds, she went out onto the balcony to unpeg the towels. Below her the rooftops were now settling into the dusk, no longer sharply defined. A smell of frying onions and grilling fish drifted. Above the town the underbellies of darkening clouds were streaked gold by the last of the dying sun. Suddenly, she saw her children in the distance, walking together up the hill toward the house. They straggled one behind the other, laughing and kicking a stone between them. A cool breeze had got up and blew in her face. Sometimes now, when her eyes settled upon them in this unexpected way, she failed to recognize them as her offspring. She had to look twice to make sure. And sometimes, from this very balcony, she had seen them walk off down the hill with Jack on a weekend, arms entwined, a threesome. She had stared after them for a long time, the hill falling away precipitously below the house, her emotions trailing after them until they were lost from her sight. Now, already, their voices carried up to her from the road below. But even as they walked toward her they seemed to come no nearer in the evening shadows. Above the world on her narrow ledge she was adrift, and they unheeding of her presence. She did not remember always feeling like this. Something had slipped through her fingers. She felt hollowed out inside. She remembered again those nursery rhyme pictures on Yumi’s wall, and Jack’s voice long ago repeating the nonsensical babble to his tiny children.

Hey diddle diddle

The cat and the fiddle,

The cow jumped over the moon.

She said the words to herself and it was as if for the first time they acquired some meaning. She saw the cow spring toward the sky, felt the icy rush of wind on her own face as she sailed up, higher and higher. And then there was the darkness as she landed, the other side of the moon. She stared out into the evening, and saw at last the barrenness of the strange terrain, stretching out endlessly before her without a single comforting landmark. There were now no voices from the road.

In the distance the lights came on in Emiko’s house, and then there was a sudden fiery blossoming of Megumi and Tami and Yoshiko’s windows. They appeared of little matter. Michiko fixed her eyes upon Fumiko’s house but darkness still enveloped it. She waited and slowly, as she knew they must, first one dim light and then another appeared, far away as if at the end of a plumb line. She remembered again the bare rooms, the faint smell of drains, and the frayed matting. She shut her eyes and the images filled her, like an old scent released from a long closed cupboard.

Now her children’s voices were behind her. They snapped on the many shiny bulbs, filling the rooms of the house with light. Michiko turned, her arms full of towels, and stepped off the narrow balcony. She made her way to the children’s room. They looked up as she entered, suddenly wary at the new grimness of her expression. She marched into their bathroom to fold the towels over the rack.

“Why are you back so late? Was it basketball practice again tonight? And what is today’s homework assignment?” She stood before them, hands on hips.

“Okaasan.” They growled in the terrible, warning manner they always did whenever she spoke in Japanese. But she stood her ground and did not back off as usual when they rolled their eyes Heavenward, and sniggered together in the alien slang she always failed to grasp.

“I asked you what your homework assignments are. What happened to that project on wells that you were supposed to research? When I was a child we only had water from wells in the village. My uncle knew all about wells. If we give him a call he would help you. That was pure water, no chemicals in it at all.” Nostalgia gripped her throat.

“Oh God. Oh Christ.” They grimaced and growled anew. They flung their limbs about, looking at her strangely. She continued to speak, her tone growing firmer, her feet planted firmly on the pink carpet. They frowned and grew silent and exchanged long suffering glances. She took no notice of them.

And slowly, as she stood her ground, she felt them advance toward her. They replied in perfect Japanese, as effortless as that other tongue they forked so threateningly before her. And now a new feeling filled her. It was as if she drew them in on a string, and at last they followed where she led.

“You have holidays next week. I think we’ll go to the village. How long is it since you saw your grandparents? How about packing your bag?”

“Okaasan.” The grumbles were faint now. And slowly, first one and then the other, went to pull knapsacks from the cupboard.

[1979]